UPDATE VIllision Mage has now found its way on to download scrapers, traffic harvesting and click-bait web sites like SoftwareInsider.com and soft112.com. 'Offers' and 'downloads' are nearly always fake or bait 'n switch as their purpose is to farm traffic for clicks and Ad revenues, or occasionally linking through to eBay listings or other stores, outlets and pages where 'Illusion Mage' is bundled together with other obsolete software and sold "for the convenience". None of these sites appear to have a report feature (aside from eBay).

UPDATE IVIllusionMage (Illusion Mage) et al Affiliate program and sales continue to be facilitated via the Click2Sell.eu affiliate platform who currently don't have a mechanism to report items sold through their platform.

UPDATE IIIt's been confirmed that you might be able to get a refund or get your money back on Illusion Mage/3D Magix Pro purchases through your bank or payment gateway so it's imperative that you follow the steps below, and where/if necessary, point them (the banks etc.) to this topic so they can confirm the refund request/reversal event against the facts presented here. However, and as mentioned below, it's important to understand that getting a refund on the Illusion Mage scam may be dependant on how your bank works, not all of which have the same refund policies in place. So check with them to make sure.

UPDATE IIf you've found yourself at the receiving end of the Illusion Mage, 3DMagix, 3D Magix Pro or whatever else '"Seth Avery" decides to call this 'product' and want your money back, there are a couple of things you can do to properly seek remedy against the payment. Note that these may vary depending on your geographical location so, although Mr Avery states clearly there is a 60 day refund policy, if you're in the UK making a purchase, your 'right' to expect what you paid for is protected under a 14 day return/refund Statutory Right (this has to be a legitimate grievance by the way, faulty goods, goods not as described and so on.. it's not normally binding where you simply change your mind after purchase - remedy in those situations are at the discretion of the seller, not the buyer).

First... Make sure you submit a support/customer ticket with ClickBank and/or the various sites running the scams so your request is officially logged, this is important. You should receive and automated email reply of such.

Second... Contact your bank, if you used a Credit, Debit Card or other bank based payment. Or PayPal and issue a charge-back or refund request making sure to state that you didn't receive what you paid for, goods were not as described and/or they may in fact be distributing 'illegal' copyrighted material or other statements to the affect that it's made clear the product is entirely different to what you were expecting (software updates excluding)

It's then just a question of seeing what response you garner from the Banks, unfortunately there's not too much more consumers can do beyond this. If the Bank or your payment gateway doesn't cancel or issue a charge-back on the transaction then you'll have to consider the money lost.

Duped? Why what do you mean?. Well, it's like this. The 'software' or 'suite' that is "illusionMage" and/or "3DMagixPro" is essentially an out-right scam, an old product, with the same content re-branded and resold when too many people become aware of the scam. The core product is in fact nothing more than a ZIP file containing Blender 3D, with minor re-branding, several obsolete Open Source applications, some ripped third-party filched PDF's and other stolenmisappropriated community authored material[link]. All of which can be found within a few minutes using a search engine, and all freely available.

To put it in a way that might be found on Wikipidea;

Quote

IllusionMage is a electronically distributed 'eproduct' attributed to a fictitious 'owner' whose identity has changed on a number of occasions. The product itself is a ZIP or RAR archive (depending on source) comprising a number of freely available and Open Sourced applications and other materials; this includes (but is not limited to), a typically outdated version of Blender 3D, and miscellaneous community authored documentation.

Other names the bundle has or is being sold under include "IllusionMage3D", "3DMagix" and "3DMagixPro". There are also a number of associated domain names[1][2][3], typically registered by third party sales affiliates.

Criticism: IllusionMage has come under heavy criticism by many prominent Blender news sites and community figures, including Ton Roosendaal the founder of the Blender Foundation, BlenderNation et-al, due to the way attribution is often obfuscated, making it unclear to prospective customers that they are in fact purchasing material that is freely available elsewhere on the Internet from less dubious sources.

Who is behind IllusionMage, 3DMagixPro et-al?No-one knows exactly. All that is know is what's publicly available on illusionmage.com. The 'owner' of the scam turns out to be a deliberate fiction; the personal photograph of 'Seth Avery' used in all their marketing is a stock photo, with other marketing materials misappropriating the identity of a real Seth Avery, a University Resercher who naturally wants to distance themselves from this confusion.

The business itself, also called "IllusionMage" (according to their ToS), has a P.O. Box registered in New Zealand, which implies the owner of the scam, or at least the person responsible for the paperwork, is also a New Zealander (or someone with access to the Box). There are references to other "companies" these are not revealed so prospective customers may be dealing with any manner of entities.

Why the controversy over IllusionMage/3DMagixPro?The controversy is essentially one of "Open Source Software leeching", i.e. the misappropriation of software applications and/or materials released under various 'open' or 'free to use' licenses, or abandoned, obsolete or no longer supported, and typically at the expense or loss of the originating author or authors - a particularly irksome and ironic aspect of these types of scams is that many of the applications sold in the bundles like IllusionMage died through lack of funding.

So why can't IllusionMage be stopped or sued?IllusionMage, and other Open Source Software Leeches, generally can't be sued or touched 'legally' because they typically dance one step on the right side of license compliance. This is often because 'free to use' software's only meaningful condition in this context is "attribution" - an acknowledgement of point of origin (typically a place or author). Unfortunately, the manner of attribution (who, what, when, where) is rarely defined in any detail, leaving leeches like IllusionMage only being required to simply mention "Blender" somewhere, anywhere once, to pretty much be in full compliance. As can be imagined, under such circumstances, sales material can make all sort of claims, misdirect, misinform or otherwise obfuscate the true nature of the product for sale, it isa form of bait-n-switch, making the prospective customer think they are purchasing one thing when they are in fact buying something else.

Why is IllusionMage everywhere and yet no-one has heard of it?Marketing. The apparent success of IllusionMage is down to the fact that the author/owner of the 'suite' has generated and extensively used all manner of fake Illusionmage reviews, fake IllusionMage articles, even fake IllusionMage anti-scam and fake IllusionMage anti-ripoff reports. All this fake material is initially published to a collection of article syndication websites, which then distribute it all over the Internet through a network of subscribers looking for 'unique content' (ironic given that most articles are duplicates of a master document with a few changes here-and-there), who don't care or don't vet their content. This technique is consider a form of "traffic tunneling" or "revenue funneling" because all of it points to the same destination, the (currently) Click2Sell purchase page.

For consumers, the use of spam like this goes beyond simply product marketing; there is so much of it in fact that it's extremely difficult to find any truly genuine reviews of, or complaints about, IllusionMage, they are simply pushed out of the way by the shear volume of article spam. This obviously creates a false impression of the product that is a challenge to counter, and easily catches unsuspecting fish.

It's worth pointing out here that Search Engine providers like Google, Bing et-al consider this type of activity an abuse of their services and often penalise individuals and entities that engage in it. Naturally once they find out of course.

How can IllusionMage be stopped?As alluded to above, as the entity behind the scam has been careful enough to stay just on the right side of licensing requirements (no matter the flimsiness of this fact), the only entities permitted to pursue action against them would be the Copyright or License holders for the software and training materials being used. As much of it is Open Source, prosecuting misappropriations or infringements is complicated, something that's easily taken advantage as in the case of IllusionMage and its 'owner'.

Having said this it doesn't mean there aren't things that can't be done. Primarily scams survive on duping people so the more education and awareness that can be brought to the fore the better; forum, website and social media posts for example, spread the word, but are often spammed themselves with further supportive spam (note that very few will actually have purchased and used the 'suite' and instead will reply a number of the same sales points).

What to do if you purchased IllusionMage after finding out it's a scamGetting a refund on an IllusionMage purchase will depend a great deal on the merchant system used to process payments. Naturally with IllusionMage being a scam they change vendors each time one shuts down on them. As such check the Terms & Conditions as relevant to refunds and repayments - if the provision is available, file a complaint against the seller with the Vendor, if enough are received Vendors will be obliged to deal with the matter. If payment was by Credit, Debit or other 'card', contact the payment provider to see if a reversal is possible. File a complaint about the seller again. The point is to lodge complaints with as many 'authorities' as possible (payment gateways, service providers etc.), cutting off potential options they can use to accept payments.

It appears that the 3DMagix scam is back, this time as "3DMagixPro" (3dmagixpro.com). Same deal, same 'package', different presentation (but the same as Illusion Mage). This time promoted by "Cody Landon" a "Software and Graphics Engineer" - can't be that good of an engineer if he can't tell he's reselling Blender 3D and community generated content again!.

Again the scam is deceptive in it's presentation on just what you're buying, if 3D Magix Pro isn't a piece of software (Blender 3D in this case), then just what are you buying (that is meant in terms of who owns the material being sold and not the bullet point list of 'features', "Cody" didn't write it, so did he get permissions for inclusion)? If the previous iteration of the 3DMagix scam and the Illusion Mage scam are anything to go by it's likely nothing more than other peoples stolen and uncredited material packed up into a 'product' of dubious origins. Buyers beware. Oh and just as above, forget about support of any kind. Don't say you haven't been warned.

The 3D Magix Pro scam is purchasable through PayPal via a 'company' called "Frontier Inc." ("Frontier Entertainment" - not to be confused with the said same Frontier Entertainment game developer, one can quite easily speculate that the 'name' was chosen as yet another tool to purposefully deceive). Illusion Mage is purchased through clickbank.net (which seems act as payment gateway for a lot of similar looking 'services').

So... it's quite a sad collection then, relative to 3D Magix, 3D Magix Pro and Illusion Mage being the superduper, mega-excellant, pixar-liscious package that it isn't. It's all out of date, being for the most part about Blender 2.34 or 2.36, which must be about five or so years old now? Not only that but no real care has been given to the materials selection in terms of there being any particular learning chronology; "Seth Avery", "Cory Landon" or whatever his name is, has quite literally grabbed some files off the internet and bundled them together in RAR and ZIP archive which he's simply reselling 'as is'. There's nothing of any inherent value created by doing this. You can't even argue the "convenience" angle because the material is useless given how Blender has changed since 2.34/6, especially with 2.5 series out now. The truth is out now, so hopefully this information will serve to inform the unsuspecting ahead of the fake articles and junk anti-scam reviews he's spammed the Internet with.

Is 3D Magix a scam? Yes.

Is 3D Magix Pro a scam? Yes.

Is Illusion Mage 3D a scam? Yes.

Footnotes:

**: Most if not all the videos included in the package are freely available from - http://www.ibiblio.org/bvidtute/. Material is released under artlibre.org license (which does allow "commercial use" but appears to require attribution and not just license inclusion).

Obviously with Christmas having just been and gone, reports are coming in that people have fallen foul of the Illusion Mage and 3D Magix Pro scams. The question then is, how do you/my mum/dad/aunty or the relative that bought Illusion Mage/3D Magix as a Christmas present for you or someone else get their money refunded? I doubt the "60 day money back guarantee" is worth the virtual paper its written on so... what you need to do is issue a charge-back on the Illusion Mage/3D Magix Pro purchase through the debit/credit card, PayPal, or whatever mechanism was used to buy the fake product. Let them know the reason, that Illusion Mage/3D Magix Pro are 'fake' products sold through deliberately misleading advertising (point them at this topic if it helps explain things to them). You can then also let Clickbank.net know they have a fraudulent seller using their services, although it's doubtful anything will be done there as Clickbank appears to be used quite extensively by 'scams' of this nature.

Finally, as readers of this topic have already been doing, drop KatsBits (info@katsbits.com) a line and let us know about your experiences with the Illusion Mage/3D Magix Pro scams. The more awareness brought to bear on this scam, the better.

Be aware there are a good number of new articles appearing online, which incidentally have appeared within a few days of each other over the Christmas/New Year period on more websites than Yell.com has in its directory, all attesting to how "great" IllusionMage3D and/or 3D Magix Pro are and how they're genuine products. They're not of course. It's all smoke and mirrors.

As before, these new articles repeat claims of being "honest" and "personal" reviews of IllusionMage, which again, they're not. But that's besides the point because in suggesting that these reviews are "personal" and "honest" the author is tapping into a well understood and used psychological sales 'trick' that takes advantage of a fundamental 'flaw' (as salesmen liken it to being) in way we process the information we absorb; that we are more likely to believe something when it's told to us by someone. This means our initial assumptions about a product, whether founded in truth or lies, if not countered, are believed because we generally 'trust' what we're told; a review on a web site that appears to belong to a 'person' (as opposed to a business) plays into the aforementioned 'flaw' because we automatically assume the contents to be true by association - it's on someone's personal site so must have been written by a person, therefore it must be true/real, even if the opposite is in fact the case (notwithstanding the originating articles author being a real person, obviously).

This is why scams work, something that's exacerbated (for consumers) if sellers are not honest from the outset. If that's the case then it's relatively straightforward to manipulate the initial assumptions made about a product being looking at; we only start to get a hint that something's wrong when we start to see the same information appearing over and over again in different guises, the IllusionMage article spam being a case in point as it all tends to cite the same bullet points from one article to another despite the apparent differing authorship - it's one thing to cite product features, but quite another to find a users experience of using the software (the 'review') to be, word-for-word, almost identical to dozens of others.

For this latest crop of fake reviews and articles on IllusionMage/3D Magix Pro there's an added twist; repeat references to the products "Sales Rank" and "Refund Rate". In the context of this scam, this is a misappropriation of sales data directly associated with Clickbank.net, the payment and affiliate gateway through which IllusionMage is being sold and the scam carried out, for the express and deliberate purpose of lending an air of faked authenticity - by citing these numbers the scammer is reinforcing the perception of the products 'persona', making it appear more 'real' and 'truthful' than it actually is. Sales Rank and Refund Rates information is not generally available to the public, so your common-or-garden-varity article author doesn't have access to the kind of numbers that would facilitate their being able to calculate a score in the first place, that is of course, unless they're an affiliate themselves, in which case they would have access to their own sales numbers, based on commission, from which they would then be able to calculate the Clickbank Rank and Rate. It's all relative though as only the original product seller would have a true picture of the items Sales Rank and Refund Rate and as these new articles prove, even that's faked for the sake of the scam.

Screengrab from Clickbank.net, each Facebook 'like' shown in the above image is someone 'earning' an affiliate commission through the promotion of the scam (or just a 'like' based on not knowing what's actually going on) - obviously this does mean watching out for fake IllusionMage Facebook profiles, groups and pages set up to promote the scam (of which there are a good few, report them as "spam/scam") if you find them).

[edit] turns out (thanks to "Paul" posting the link on BlenderNation) that all the video tutorials included in this 'package' are grabbed from http://www.ibiblio.org/bvidtute/ as they're released under "Art Libre" license, which does allow "commercial use" of material so long as attribution is stated, not just license inclusion.

On your post of 1 december you show this picture of a supposedly anti scam website called scamx.net. I visited this site and afterwards googled it, and my impression is that this isn't an anti scam site at all.

"SportsBettingSolutions.net SCAM | SCAM - [ Vertaal deze pagina ]Is SportsBettingSolutions.net SCAM or The Real Deal? The truth will shock you: Get SportsBettingSolutions.net From This SECRET Link If you are wondering.scamx.org/sportsbettingsolutions-net-scam - In cache"

"GrammarSoftware.net SCAM | SCAM - [ Vertaal deze pagina ]Is Grammar-Software.net SCAM or The Real Deal? The truth will shock you: Get Grammar-Software.net From This SECRET Link If you are wondering about.scamx.org/grammarsoftware-net-scam - In cache"

There apear to be two sites: scamx.net and scamx.org. Different design but the same articles. And all of these articles start with exactly the same phrase: Is [product] Scam or The Real Deal etc.

The SECRET link will invariably lead to the site of this "product"

My impression is that scamx.net and scamx.org actually try to cover up scams.

There is an antiscam website called scams.net (notice the slightly different spelling) www.scams.net but this site is a forum and doesn't seem to be too active.

Oh I completely forgot about that so thanks for posting the update. And yeah, it's basically another article syndication site, albeit just dealing with spamming fake 'anti-scam' articles, after the traffic for affiliate link earning and Google Advertising. Wouldn't surprise me to see ClickBank associated with those other scams as well.

He's been exceptionally busy for the last couple of months in fact, submitting 'fake' reviews and articles to all manner of junk review sites; posting links and fake comments to others saying how good the product is; even posting fake anti-scam articles on anti-scam web sites to deliberately trick those looking for imformation about this scam into thinking it's not and buying into it. It's a win-win; he gets sales from the product, and income from Advert and affiliate traffic. Trouble is, it's all done fraudulantly.

Interesting to note that some (fake) video 'testimonials' have been added to some of the sites now (they were't there before), all apparently hosted with rackspacecloud.com (#c2913102). Whoever is really behind this must have spent a fortune registering alternative domain names, hosting, file distribution networks.. and all for traffic funneling. A few more domains;